Jacek Olczak: PMI’s Marlboro man blows smoke at ‘stupid’ critics

Jacek Olczak lost his father to a heart attack when he was nine. Olczak senior had been a smoker. For many people, that alone would have made a career in tobacco unthinkable. But the chief executive of Philip Morris International (PMI) — the biggest quoted tobacco company, seller of almost 622 billion cigarettes last year under brands including Marlboro — sees it differently. “Maybe if he’d had a product like Iqos, he would have lived longer,” Olczak says, referring to PMI’s heated-tobacco substitute.

This veteran of a sector whose wares kill millions of its customers a year has divided critics and allies alike by vowing to “unsmoke the world”. PMI made more than two thirds of its revenues — $21.6 billion (£16.7 billion) — from